


First Comes Love, Then Comes

by Barkour



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-06
Updated: 2013-02-06
Packaged: 2017-11-28 10:37:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/673453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jaime really wishes his little sister would stop calling Bart his "boyfriend."</p>
            </blockquote>





	First Comes Love, Then Comes

**Author's Note:**

> Where does this fit in the timeline? I don't know. You don't know. Maybe it doesn't fit at all! Mysteries surround us.
> 
> Rated for language (just to be careful).

The thing about baby sisters is they always know too much and they always want you to know they know. He can hear her coming up the stairs hard on her heels and shouting his name, “Jaaaaaaime.”

The scarab suggests jumping out the window.

“I’m not jumping out my window,” Jaime hisses. “It’s four in the afternoon! There might be witnesses!”

The scarab suggests, big surprise here, folks, eliminating the witnesses.

“I’m gonna enroll in an anger management class,” says Jaime, “and you’re gonna have to just sit there and learn some _basic courtesy_.”

And he definitely needs to elevate the day to day discourse of his life because the scarab’s next step is to accuse Jaime of being a huge chicken baby. They’re on the verge of one of those shouting matches that has Mom checking Jaime for a fever when Milagro throws the door open.

“Jaime!” she shouts. “What are you doing!”

Too late, he slaps his laptop shut. At least he had his headphones jacked in.

“Don’t you know how to knock?” he demands. “This is my room. You can’t just run in here.”

“Ohhhhh,” says Milagro, suddenly crafty. “Are you watching a grown-up video?”

Jaime recoils. “What! How do you even—no! I’m not—you’re ten!”

She rolls her eyes and sticks her hand on her hip in some weird approximation of that thing the girls in Jaime’s grade do.

“I watch _TV_ ,” she says, like that explains anything about his ten-year old sister.

“Get out of my room!” says Jaime.

“Fine,” says Milagro. “But your boyfriend’s here.”

“My what?” says Jaime, because this is news; he didn’t even know he was on the market.

But apparently the scarab has a better idea of what’s going on than Jaime does, because nothing in the universe makes any sense, and in Jaime’s brain a ream of statistical information about Bartholomew “Impulse” Allen starts pouring in.

“He’s not my boyfriend!” Jaime shouts.

Milagro shrugs. “Well, he’s talking to Mom.”

Jaime trips going down the stairs but he recovers with aplomb and only staggers a little on the last step. From the top of the stairs Milagro sings, “K-I-S-S-I-N-G.”

“Hey,” says Jaime, landing against the front door. He’s trying for nonchalant but also what-are-you-doing-here-are-you-trying-to-blow-my-secret-identity. Tricky to pull off.

Bart just beams. “Hey!” he says.

Mom’s got that look like she’s thinking about dragging Jaime to the bathroom for an impromptu physical. She’s even in scrubs, ready for the evening shift.

“I was just asking Bart—”

“School!” says Jaime. “We know each other from school. We’re in a club.”

“You’re not in any clubs,” says Mom.

“It’s not an official club,” he amends quickly. Bart is still grinning. “We just, you know, we, uh, meet at lunch. In the art room.”

“Oh, really? What do you guys do?”

Mom is zeroing in, her maternal interest raised. Jaime squashes the scarab’s rising intent with impunity.

“Nerd club!” says Milagro as she jumps off the bottom step. “Do you watch Star Trek?”

“What’s Star Trek?” asks Bart. “Oh, wait, no, I remember! I watched that. That’s the one with the, pchoooow, I am your father—” And he makes finger guns.

“Yeah,” says Jaime, even though everything inside of him is dying, “that’s the one, Star Trek. Bart loves Star Trek.”

“And they throw the ring in the mountain!” says Bart. More finger guns. “Slam dunk!”

“I think your boyfriend’s crazy,” Milagro whispers to Jaime.

“Okay, we’re going to my room now,” Jaime says quickly. He pushes Bart toward the stairs, hoping he’ll take the hint. “And we definitely don’t need any snacks—”

“I’m kind of hungry,” Bart protests as Jaime sheepdogs him up the steps. “I haven’t eaten in an hour, that’s like five years—”

“Are you sure?” Mom calls after them.

“Yes!” yells Jaime. “Absolutely! No doubt about it!”

She leans up the stairs as they reach the second floor, Bart all but a dead weight in Jaime’s arms, because everything’s a game to Impulse, even trying to get away from Milagro.

“Well, I’m leaving for work in ten minutes, so it’s just going to be you and Milagro and Barry—”

“That’s my grandpa,” Bart shouts cheerfully, “I’m Bart!”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” says Jaime, “don’t worry, I’ll leave my door open. I’ll heat up some empanadas for Milagro.”

“I can heat up my own empanadas!”

“Milagro, please—”

“I’m not a baby!”

Mom says, “Your father will be home in an hour!” and Jaime says, “All right, don’t worry, we’ll be fine,” and Milagro says, “Jaime doesn’t have to babysit me. I’m ten,” and Jaime shoves Bart into his room.

Bart says, “Your mom’s way plugged-in.”

Jaime says, “You’ve never seen an episode of Star Trek in your life.”

“No di-doi,” says Bart. He’s on the far side of Jaime’s room now, investigating his comics. “But some of the old people told stories about it. I really liked the one about Darth Vader and Harry Potter fighting the Borg. That one was pretty crash. Hey, what’s this?”

Jaime said he’d leave his door open, so he only closes it mostly, leaving enough space that (if he didn’t have an alien device that heightens all his senses fused with his spine on a molecular level) he could hear if Milagro blew up the microwave.

“You can’t use super speed in my house, dude.”

Jaime kicks a pair of dirty underwear under his bed. Bart might not be his boyfriend; that doesn’t mean he wants Impulse picking up his boxers and talking about how they’re totally crashing his mode.

“My parents don’t know—”

Bart’s poking around Jaime’s portable TV. “Blah, blah, secret identity. You’ve only told me like four hundred times. Why do you think I’m going so slow?” He sticks his fingers in the attached VCR panel.

“Maybe don’t stick your hand in there, hermano,” says Jaime.

“Your TV has a microwave!” says Bart, sounding so pleased.

Jaime laughs. “That’s not a microwave. It’s a VCR, for watching tapes.”

“What’s a tape?” Bart pulls his hand out and crouches to peer past the flap.

“Um,” says Jaime. He sits on the foot of his bed and stuffs his hands into his hoodie’s pocket. “It’s like this really old school way to watch movies and things. Before DVDs. A DVD’s a—”

“I know what DVDs are,” says Bart. He’s on the bed next to Jaime now, holding the remote. “We have those in the future.”

“You still use DVDs in the future?” This is, weirdly, a depressing thought. Jaime had kind of figured humanity would have moved on to digital formats.

“Oh, yeah,” says Bart brightly. “We use them to start fires. So we can cook the squirrels.”

“Sometimes I don’t know if you’re fucking with me,” says Jaime.

“What’s fuck mean?”

“Oh, man,” says Jaime. “Man. Buddy. I’m not telling you what fuck means.”

“Just kidding!” says Bart. “I know what fuck means.”

The scarab informs Jaime that it, too, knows what fuck means, and furthermore that the human sex drive is a repellent thing.

The TV turns on. Triumphant, Bart throws himself bodily backwards upon Jaime’s bed. His feet stick off the end of the bed. They’re big feet, kind of weird on somebody as skinny and short as Bart, and it probably means Bart’s going to be a big guy in ten years.

In ten years, Bart won’t even have been born. In ten years—In ten years, Jaime thinks, _nothing will happen_. Earth will be fine. Jaime will be a dentist and Milagro will be in college. In ten years everything will be normal.

The scarab is silent.

Jaime lies down next to Bart. Bart’s t-shirt is wrinkled over his belly. He’s slight, small for thirteen. Nutritional deprivation in youth can stunt a person’s growth over time. Maybe he won't grow into his feet after all.

The front door closes, slammed as Mom leaves for her E.R. shift. Milagro’s on the stairs. Now she’s in her room.

“Do you miss anyone?” Jaime asks. He knows it’s sudden. He hadn’t known he was going to say it until he opened his mouth.

Bart’s staring intently at the TV, his gaze rapt, eyes wide. They’re watching the Discovery Channel. Jaime’s had some good times watching the Discovery Channel, but he wouldn’t have pegged Bart for a Deadliest Catch kind of guy.

“Miss who?”

“Your family,” says Jaime.

“Whoa!” says Bart. He sits upright in a—well, in a flash. “Did you see that? Way crash! How do I make it replay?”

He fiddles with the remote, head bent down to it. He’s got a little mole right there, to the left of his spine, where the short-cropped brown hairs are just bristles on his nape.

Jaime sits up, too. Feet on the floor, knees apart. Hands stuck out behind him, flat, so he can lean back a little. There’s three inches of sheet separating his fingertips from the belt loop of Bart’s jeans.

“Sorry,” he says. “No can do, hermano. Not when it’s on TV like that.”

Bart blows his lips out; a high-pitched sort of helicopter hum charges the air. Then Bart falls back again, frowning.

“What’s the point if you can only play it once?”

Jaime looks down at Bart. He can kind of see up Bart’s nose. It’s better than looking at Bart’s waist, where his shirt’s still rucked up. The scarab notes that Jaime’s heart rate has accelerated. Jaime looks away.

“You could buy it on DVD. They got those season box sets.”

“Naaaaaaaah,” says Bart, managing to make that hum, too, like he’s rolling his tongue in his mouth. “I’m over it now. Do you have any video games? Do you have an Xbox? Oh, hey, sweet, you have Black Ops! Do you want to play zombie mode?”

Bart’s got Jaime’s cupboard half-emptied, games stacked haphazardly all around him.

“You did not come all the way to El Paso just to play video games with me,” says Jaime.

“Why not?” Bart looks over his shoulder. His head’s tilted so when he glances at Jaime, he does it through his bangs. “You’re my amigo, mi hermano, my best buddy Blue Beetle, mi amor—”

“You need to stop trying to speak Spanish,” Jaime says, “’cause you got no idea what you’re saying.”

Bart smiles. His eyes crease. In thirty years, he’ll have crow’s feet there—the scarab tells Jaime that. Laugh lines, too, around his mouth. If he’s alive.

“Just fucking with you,” says Bart.

He plugs the A/V lines into the TV for the Xbox. His back bends, his spine a soft and fluid line beneath his t-shirt.

Eliminate him. The scarab agitates. He is a liability.

There are three spots, integral junctures in Bart’s spine, presented right now to Jaime that if severed will paralyze Bart for approximately an hour, even with his speed-enhanced healing factor.

“Maybe you should go,” says Jaime.

“I just got here!” Bart tosses Jaime the second controller and clambers onto his bed again. “Besides I kind of fried Aunt Joan’s computer trying to get it to load faster so I’m grounded from video games for like a whole week and I’m so bored I think I’m going to _die_ and you won’t tell Flash, right?”

Jaime sighs and hits the power button on his controller. “When do I ever hang out with Flash? I _wish_ I could hang with Flash.”

“You hang with me,” Bart protests. He’s tapping his fingertips restlessly against the controller, his fingers singing like hummingbirds.

“Yeah,” says Jaime, smiling. “But like, don’t you ever want to hang out with the League? The big guys?”

Bart shrugs. “Not really. They’re all really intense, all slow down and let’s talk about this for an hour and Batman growls.”

“He does!” says Jaime. “It’s like, he needs a cough drop or something, I don’t know. He’s gotta see a doctor for that.”

The game loads. Bart’s off.

“Dude!” says Jaime. “You can’t just run off!”

“I’m shooting zombies!”

“We gotta strategize—”

“Okay,” Bart says, “I’ll shoot the zombies over here and you shoot the zombies over there.”

Jaime mashes the button, reinforcing the windows facing the overrun courtyard.

“We gotta fortify our position first, unless you want these guys to eat your brains.”

Machine gun fire splits the air. A zombie, struck hard in the chest, grunts but pushes on.

“No, no,” Bart says, “what are you doing, you gotta—”

“I know what I’m doing,” Jaime says, “I’ve been playing this game since before you were born—”

“I’ve beaten it like twelve times in the last week—”

Jaime shoves Bart. “Left, look left—”

Somebody drops onto the bed behind them, and Jaime nearly pulls a plasma cannon on them. The scarab’s waking up again.

“Whatcha playing?” asks Milagro. She squirms between them.

“Jesus!” says Jaime. “I told you to knock!”

“I’m telling Mom you used God’s name in vain,” Milagro says. She slaps Bart’s shoulder. “Shoot that guy! That guy!”

Bart does, and he and Milagro high five. Jaime retrieves his controller from the floor. It’s too late; he’s already lost a life.

“Don’t you have something else to do?” he grumbles. “Somewhere else, away from me?”

“I wanted to meet your booooyfrieeeeend,” says Milagro.

“Upgrade!” says Bart happily. “Hi, I’m Bart! But you can call me—uh, Bart!”

“I think he’s broken,” Milagro says sideways to Jaime.

“Hey, don’t be a brat to my friends,” Jaime says, “you brat.”

Milagro sticks her tongue out at Jaime and crosses her eyes. The scarab is nearly as repulsed as Jaime.

“Aw, she’s not a brat,” says Bart easily, “I think she’s crash.”

“You only think that because you don’t have a little sister,” Jaime mutters.

Bart smiles at Milagro, that dopey, eye-creasing smile that almost makes his floppy hair and big ears look part of a whole.

“Little sisters are way crash,” Bart says.

Milagro leans away from Bart and into Jaime. She pokes Jaime in the ribs, and Jaime swats at her. The scarab says, No, her _head_ , but Jaime blocks that thought away, thinking, viciously, I’m not shooting my baby sister.

“He’s not broken,” Milagro whispers.

“Why are you in my room!” says Jaime loudly.

“You don’t have any sisters?” Milagro has moved on. “Not even any brothers?”

“Jaime’s my brother,” says Bart, attention fixed on the TV.

The scarab says, He is deceiving you. The speedster seeks to manipulate—

Jaime breathes in, deeply, to calm the fluttering in his gut. Bart’s tongue flashes, touching his lower lip.

“I’ll give you ten dollars if you go to your room,” Jaime says.

“See you later!” says Milagro, already slipping off the bed.

Bart laughs and looks at Jaime. “She’s crash. I like her.”

“She’s all right,” says Jaime, embarrassed, and Bart’s grin widens, making him look a little wild, like he just circumnavigated the globe and then fell on Jaime’s bed to play Call of Duty: Black Ops.

“It’s gotta be cool,” says Bart, still watching Jaime, “being a big brother. I think that’s neat.”

Jaime fiddles with the joystick. “You really don’t have any—”

“Well,” says Bart. “Not yet. ‘Cause of time travel. Not then either. But hey, maybe I will!”

Jaime thinks, What about your family? He can’t say it. Looking at Bart, smiling with his top teeth showing and his skinny shoulders dropping, Jaime is afraid.

Ask him, says the scarab, amused. Ask him if you kill them.

“I won’t,” says Jaime fiercely.

Bart squints. His nose wrinkles. “You won’t have a sister? She’s not that annoying…”

“Forget it,” says Jaime. He hits pause on his controller. His shoulders hunch. “You wanna watch Star Trek?”

“Sure,” says Bart. “Are you okay?”

“Fine. I’m fine.”

He fumbles through the stack of DVDs, looking for that black spine when he keeps thinking about how Bart’s back curved in front of him, easy and defenseless.

“Really?” asks Bart. “’Cause you don’t seem fine, and I know I don’t always understand everything because the past is weird, but—”

“I’m fine!” Jaime bursts. “I’m fine, I said I was fine, why do you gotta keep pushing me every time—”

He turns. Bart’s eyes are huge. He’s still sitting on Jaime’s bed, but perched there on the edge like he’s one half-thought away from getting up and touching Jaime, touching him on the shoulder probably like he always touches Jaime, like they’re best friends, like they’ve known each other for years and not, like, two seconds, like Jaime didn’t cross over to the Dark Side and end the world and—

He wants to ask, what about Milagro, do you know Milagro, is she alive in the future, did I kill her, what about my mom, what about Dad? There are cousins, aunts, uncles he hasn’t seen in months, not since his grandma’s seventieth birthday, and now he can’t get them out of his head, this sprawling cascade of Reyes, his family—And Brenda. And Paco.

And Bart.

“I’m sorry,” Jaime says. He covers his face. Runs his fingers back through his hair. His palms hide his eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you. You didn’t do anything.”

“Hey, no worries,” says Bart. His fingertips are on Jaime’s wrists. Some comfort. “It’s okay, hermano.”

“No,” Jaime says, his eyes hot and dry, still dry, he hasn’t cried once since the scarab fused with his neural pathways, “it’s not okay. It’s not.”

“Yes, it is,” says Bart, and his hands are on Jaime’s face, his fingertips are at Jaime’s cheeks; his thumbs frame Jaime’s mouth. “It’s okay, everything’s okay, you’re a good guy, you’re a hero, you save the world—”

Jaime steps forward. He bends. Bart says—Bart says nothing at all. His mouth is still, his jaw slack. Jaime’s lips mash up against his teeth. The fingers on Jaime’s skin flutter once. Bart is warm, so very warm, and he is still.

How much has he asked of Bart already?

Jaime steps back.

“Sorry,” he says, “sorry, Bart, I shouldn’t—”

Bart’s edges go soft. He blurs. His hands are on Jaime’s face, in his hair, cradling Jaime’s ears as Bart kisses him and kisses him and kisses him again, dry lips dotting Jaime’s nose and his eyelid and the corner of his mouth, the tip of his chin.

Bart is talking but it’s a whine, too fast even for the scarab to pick up, and Jaime can’t follow, he can’t, he can’t keep up with Bart, so he does the only thing he can do and throws his arms around Bart and holds Bart close and still against him.

“Slow down,” Jaime says, “slow down, I can’t—I don’t know what you’re saying, Bart, you gotta—”

And Bart says between kisses, landing like static shocks here on Jaime’s cheek, there on the bridge of his nose: “You’re crash, you’re so crash, you’re the crashest thing in the whole world, you’re, like, so crash you’re crashing me, and—”

Jaime goes for Bart’s mouth and catches his eyebrow, and Bart laughs; he laughs; he laughs and kisses Jaime’s hair and then he jerks back and says, “Oh, gross, it’s on my tongue—”

“Why are you licking my hair?” Jaime demands. “Is that some kind of—you guys do that in the future? You lick people’s hair?”

There’s nothing remotely attractive about Bart scratching at his tongue, but Jaime kisses him again anyway. Gets two of Bart’s fingers, the tips of them anyway, and Bart’s tongue, too.

The scarab retreats, hissing: Disgusting; and Jaime thinks, You’re welcome! and he laughs into Bart’s mouth because—because the only other thing he can think of right now is how Bart’s laughing, too, that sort of nasally laugh that breaks halfway through, like Bart can’t believe it, either, like this is as incredible to Bart as it is to Jaime. Like this is good. This is a good thing. It’s good.

Everything’s okay.

Bart says, “You bit my finger.”

“Sorry,” says Jaime. “I didn’t mean to.”

“It’s okay,” says Bart happily, “I’ll just bite you back.”

Jaime’s door swings open; it crashes into the wall. The scarab is too far gone to even suggest throwing Bart out the window, and Jaime is too entangled in Bart’s lanky, clunky arms to think about throwing himself out the window.

“Ha!” says Milagro. “I knew it. Also, Dad’s home.”

“Oh, cool!” says Bart. “Your dad!”

“Get out of my room!” Jaime shouts.

Milagro primps her hair. “So you and your boyfriend can keep K-I-S-S—”

Jaime slams the door in her face.

“—I-N-G!” she yells through it.

“Little sisters are so crash,” Bart tells Jaime.

Jaime snorts. “Car crash, maybe.”

They look at each other across Jaime’s bedroom, Jaime at his door and Bart by his bed. Bart scratches at the back of his neck. His t-shirt pulls up again. He’s got freckles around his belly button. Jesus, thinks Jaime.

“Well,” Bart hedges, “we’re not sitting in a tree.”

“Close enough,” says Jaime, and the smooth corners of Bart's eyes crinkle.


End file.
